Robert H. Bahmer
Robert H. Bahmer, long-time resident of the Washington area and fourth Archivist of the United States, died on March 14 at the age of 86.
Born in North Dakota, Dr. Bahmer graduated from North Dakota State Teacher’s College, obtained a master’s degree from the University of Colorado, and in 1941 was awarded the Ph.D. degree in American history by the University of Minnesota.
He joined the staff of the National Archives in 1936. A specialist in records management, Dr. Bahmer was loaned by the Archives to the Navy Department in 1942 to serve for nearly a year as the Navy’s chief of archival services. Later he transferred to the War Department to become deputy chief of the Records Management Branch of the Adjutant General’s Office where he shared responsibility for developing the first comprehensive records management program for the entire War Department.
In 1948, he was named a consultant to the Commission on Organization of the Executive Branch of the government, chaired by former President Herbert Hoover. In June of 1948 he returned to the National Archives to serve as deputy to the Archivist of the United States Wayne C. Grover.
Dr. Bahmer was appointed Archivist in 1966. As the fourth Archivist, he oversaw the operations of the National Archives and Records Service and also served as chair of the National Historical Publications Commission, the grant-making body of the National Archives. He retired in March of 1968.
Dr. Bahmer received the Distinguished Service Award of the General Services Administration in 1960. He was also the recipient of the George Norlin Award in 1967, the highest award bestowed by the Associated Alumni of the University of Colorado. In 1968, he received an honorary LLD degree from the University of North Dakota.
He served as president of the Society of American Archivists in 1962 and as Secretary General of the International Council on Archives for several years. He was a member of the American Historical Association and an ex-officio member of the American Revolution Bicentennial Commission.
Dr. Bahmer is survived by his daughter and two sons.
Charles Howard Carter
Charles Howard Carter, professor of history at Tulane University and a noted specialist on Spanish and European diplomacy in the 16th and early 17th centuries, died unexpectedly on March 24, 1990, at the age of 62.
Dr. Carter was born in Baker, OR, in 1927. He attended Willamette University and the University of Chicago before receiving his B.S. degree in 1957 from Columbia University, where he was Phi Beta Kappa. He subsequently earned master’s and Ph.D. degrees in history from Columbia, doing research for his dissertation with the aid of Gilder and Lydig Traveling Fellowships and a Fulbright grant. He taught at Long Island University in 1959, at the University of Oregon from 1961 to 1963, and from 1963 until his death at Tulane, where he specialized in Spanish and English history during the period 1450 to 1650.
His dissertation was the basis of his widely acclaimed Secret Diplomacy of the Hapsburgs, 1598–1625, which received the Charles F. Ansley award. Dr. Carter also wrote a stimulating manual, The Western European Powers, 1500–1700, which discussed the various types of sources, collections, and repositories that can be drawn upon in the study of early modern diplomatic history.
Dr. Carter was also editor of a distinguished festschrift, From the Renaissance to the Counter-Reformation: Essays in Honor of Garrett Mattingly, to which he contributed a paper entitled, “The Ambassadors of Early Modern Europe: Patterns of Diplomatic Representation in the Early 17th Century,” and of an abridged and revised edition of C.J. Burckhardt’s Richelieu: His Rise to Power.
During his many years at Tulane, Dr. Carter was an energetic and active teacher of both graduate and undergraduate students. Active in university affairs, he was a vigorous chair of the History Department from 1975 to 1978. He was also a member of the American Historical Association, the English Historical Association, the Renaissance Society of America, and the Southern Historical Association. He will be remembered both as an innovative scholar and a dedicated teacher, and will be sorely missed by his students, colleagues, and friends.
Charles T. Davis
Tulane University
Giovanni Costigan
Giovanni Costigan, professor emeritus in the Department of History at the University of Washington, Seattle, died on March 24. He was 85.
Dr. Costigan was a member of the faculty at the University of Washington from 1934 to 1975. He was born in England of Irish parentage, was graduated from Oxford University in 1926, and received his Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin in 1930. He taught for a few years at the University of Wisconsin and the University of Idaho before assuming his position at the University of Washington.
Dr. Costigan’s academic specialty was the history of England and Ireland. His publications include Sigmund Freud: A Short Biography (1965), Makers of Modern England (1967), and History of Modern Ireland (1969). It was as a teacher and humanitarian that Dr. Costigan gained great fame in the Seattle community. In 1970 he won the first Distinguished Teaching Award offered by the University of Washington, and in 1958 was honored as Man of the Year by B’nai B’rith in Seattle. In 1967 Lewis and Clark College awarded him an honorary degree.
An outspoken opponent of U.S. policy in Vietnam, he was once referred to by a Seattle Times reporter as a “combative man of peace.” His mandatory retirement at the age of 70 caused public debate, and two years later the Washington state legislature passed a bill popularly known as the “Costigan bill” that permitted professors to teach past the age of 70 under extraordinary circumstances. In his later years, Dr. Costigan travelled widely around the world and gave many lectures for the U.W. Alumni Association.
Arther Ferrill
University of Washington
Lawrence A. Cremin
Lawrence A. Cremin, 64, a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian who spent 23 years writing a definitive trilogy on American public education, died September 4.
He won the Pulitzer Prize for history in 1981 for American Education: The National Experience, 1783–1876, the second volume of a three-volume history of U.S. schools from colonial times through 1980. The final volume, American Education: The Metropolitan Experience, 1876–1980, was published in 1988. His 1962 book, The Transformation of the School, won the prestigious Bancroft Prize for American history.
His most recent work, published last spring, was Popular Education and Its Discontents, which offered philosophical answers to the question of how U.S. schools developed as they did. He argued that the current school crisis stems not so much from the mediocrity of schools or educators, but from outside forces that are overburdening schools with more and more demands.
At the time of his death he was working on a biography of educational pioneer John Dewey.
Dr. Cremin was a native and resident of New York City and served in the Army Air Force during World War II. He was a 1946 graduate of City College of New York and received master’s and doctoral degrees from Columbia University.
Dr. Cremin was president of Columbia University’s Teachers College from 1974 to 1984 and was the Frederick A. P. Barnard Professor of Education at the college.
Since 1985, he was president of the Spencer Foundation, whose major priority is educational research. He was a member of the foundation’s board of directors since 1973.
Dr. Cremin was a founding member of the National Academy of Education and served as its president from 1969 to 1973. He also was a past president of the Society for History Education, the AHA, and the National Society of College Teachers of Education.
Survivors include his wife, Charlotte, of New York City; and two children.
Marcus F. Cunliffe
Marcus F. Cunliffe, 68, professor of American history at George Washington University, who was a noted author and a witty and incisive commentator on this country’s history and literature, died September 2.
Dr. Cunliffe, a resident of Washington, D.C., had served on the George Washington University faculty since 1980 and was the second person to be appointed to the rank of University Professor since then.
He was the author of books that included both the popular and penetrating biography George Washington: Man and Monument, published in 1958, andThe Literature of the United States, published in 1954 by Penguin Books in Britain.
The latter book was the beginning of Dr. Cunliffe’s enviable reputation as a writer, teacher, and something of a father of interdisciplinary American studies in his native Britain.
Dr. Cunliffe said he became interested in America from seeing American films as a child, reading the works of Stephen Crane and James Thurber in school, and watching Americans fight during World War II. In addition to his research, he also maintained a lively interest in the work and lives of former students and colleagues. His interests spanned intellectual horizons and his works were not contained by the narrow boundaries of academic disciplines.
He wrote on the American presidency and slavery, as well as several books for children. His 1968 book Soldiers and Civilians: The Martial Spirit in American, 1775–1865 examined our society and the military. He was also co-editor of Pastmasters: Some Essays on American Historians.
It may have been the figure of George Washington that most intrigued him. In addition to his noted one-volume study, he was co-author of a juvenile work about the country’s first president. In 1962 he edited a new edition of the classic Life of Washington by M.L. Weems.
Dr. Cunliffe was an intelligence officer in the British army’s Royal Tank Regiment during World War II. A graduate of Oxford University’s Oriel College, he studied as a Commonwealth Fund Fellow at Yale University from 1947 to 1949.
He taught at Manchester from 1949 to 1965, then at the University of Sussex until 1980. During those years he also spent time as a visiting professor at Harvard and Stanford Universities, as well as at the University of Michigan. He was a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center in Washington in 1977 and 1978.
Survivors include his wife, Phyllis Palmer of Washington; three children by his first marriage, Antonia Cunliffe Davis of Birmingham, England, and Jason and Shay Cunliffe, both of New York City; and four grandchildren.
Raymond C. Dingledine Jr.
Raymond C. Dingledine, Jr., emeritus professor of history and former chair of the history department at James Madison University, died on July 18. He was 71 years old. For generations of students at Madison College, later James Madison University, and to the city of Harrisonburg, Dr. Dingledine represented a tradition of scholarship and public service which was unique in the community.
Born in Harrisonburg, VA, 1919, where his father was both mayor and professor of history, Dr. Dingledine received his B.A., master’s, and Ph.D. from the University of Virginia. In 1948, following service in the U.S. Navy, he joined the faculty of Madison College. In 1965 he became department chair, a post which he held until his retirement 21 years later. Dr. Dingledine was the first chair of the history department following its separation from the social sciences. His great loves were his family, Virginia, the university, and Harrisonburg. For 18 years he was a crucial member of the city council, where he was greatly valued for his tact and his concern for the entire community.
During his years at James Madison, Dr. Dingledine wrote the definitive history of Madison College, Madison College: The First Fifty Years, 1908–1958. In 1956 he published Virginia’s History for the commonwealth’s public schools. Nine years later he revised and expanded this text into Virginia’s History and Geography, including Our Home, Virginia, and the World. Throughout his tenure, he taught a much-loved course in Virginia history. At the end of his life, Dr. Dingledine was completing an autobiography of William Cabell Rives, Virginia statesman and patriot. This work is being edited and prepared for publication by the author’s daughter, Anne Dingledine Stribling.
Surviving are Dr. Dingledine’s wife, Emily Reel Dingledine, four children, and six grandchildren.
Francis C. Haber
Francis C. Haber, 69, a retired University of Maryland professor who had served as chairman of the department from 1968 to 1972, died March 11.
Dr. Haber specialized in intellectual history, especially the history of science. Among his books was The Age of the World from Moses to Darwin, in which he discussed how discoveries in geology affected thinking about time and the age of the world.
More recently he had done research on attitudes towards technology and scientific thinking and moral aspects of technological development. He was a member of the International Society for the Study of Time and had written articles about certain aspects of time and history. He was also associate editor of the Maryland Historical Magazine.
A resident of Washington, Dr. Haber was born in Flint, MI. He graduated from the University of Connecticut and served in the merchant marine during World War II. He received a doctorate in history from The Johns Hopkins University and while studying there was librarian at the Peabody Institute in Baltimore.
He joined the faculty at the University of Maryland in 1966 after having taught at the University of Florida. He retired February 1. Survivors include his wife, Margaret Haber of Washington; and a son from his first marriage, Robert O. Haber of Tallahassee, FL.
Trumbull Higgins
Trumbull Higgins, 70, a military historian and an author, died on April 25.
Dr. Higgins, who once described himself as “a specialist in military fiasco,” was a professor of history at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice and wrote numerous books on military history, concentrating on strategy and policy decisions during World War II, the Korean War, and the Bay of Pigs invasion.
His latest book, The Perfect Failure, published in 1987, is a case study of the ill-fated Bay of Pigs operation. Among his earlier works was Winston Churchill and the Second Front, published in 1957. It was a study of the Allied decision to invade North Africa in 1942. A book on the Korean conflict, Korea and the Fall of MacArthur: A Précis in Limited War, was published in 1960.
Dr. Higgins was a long-time resident of Manhattan. He was graduated from Princeton in 1941 and earned his doctorate in history there in 1951. He lectured often at the National War College in Washington. He was a member of the American Historical Association since 1951.
Dr. Higgins is survived by his wife, Barbara Guest; a son, Jonathan, of Santa Cruz; a stepdaughter, Hadley Haden-Guest of Manhattan; and two sisters, Faith McCurdy and Anita Salembier of Long Island.
Nathan Irvin Huggins
Nathan Irvin Huggins, W.E.B. DuBois Professor of History and of Afro-American Studies at Harvard University, died on December 5, 1989, at the age of 62.
Born in Chicago and raised in San Francisco, Dr. Huggins received his undergraduate education at the University of California, Berkeley, and his graduate training at Harvard, which awarded him the Ph.D. degree in 1962. After teaching at Long Beach State College, Lake Forest College, and the University of Massachusetts, Boston, Dr. Huggins became a professor of history at Columbia University in 1970. Ten years later he joined the Harvard faculty as chairman of the Afro-American Studies Department and director of the W.E.B. DuBois Institute for Research in Afro-American Studies.
Huggins served on numerous departmental and faculty committees at Columbia, and was an effective member of the Board of Syndics of the Harvard University Press. He was also active in the affairs of the historical profession, serving on the editorial board of The American Historical Review and The Journal of American History and as a member of the Program Committee, the Executive Board, and the Frederick Jackson Turner Prize Committee of the Organization of American Historians. In addition, he was a juror for the National Endowment for the Humanities, and a member of the Smithsonian Council, the USIA Panel of International Educational Exchange, and the Bradley Commission on History in Schools.
At Harvard Dr. Huggins strove to give legitimacy and respectability to the Afro-American Studies department by raising standards for both the faculty and the students. Refusing to simplify the complexities of the black experience, he sought to make his students and his readers understand that Afro-American history was not a separate subject but was part of what he often referred to as a “seamless web” of American history.
His most influential publications include Harlem Renaissance; Black Odyssey: The Afro-American Ordeal in Slavery; and Slave and Citizen: The Life of Frederick Douglass. He also edited Voices from the Harlem Renaissance and was co-editor of Key Issues in the Afro-American Experience. At the time of his death he was completing a long historiographical introduction for a new edition of Black Odyssey.
Huggins is survived by his wife, Brenda Smith Huggins.
David Herbert Donald
Harvard University
Mary Ellis Kahler
Mary Ellis Kahler, 70, a historian and a retired senior specialist in Hispanic bibliography at the Library of Congress, died June 26.
Dr. Kahler came to the Washington area in 1949 when she went to work at the Library of Congress as an intern. She became chief of the serial record division in 1957 and the Hispanic Division in 1973. From 1978 to 1981, she was field director of the Library of Congress office in Rio de Janeiro. She then returned to the Hispanic Division, where her duties included work on various Hispanic manuscripts. She retired in 1988.
Among the works she edited is The Harkness Collection in the Library of Congress: Manuscripts Concerning Mexico: A Guide.
Dr. Kahler, who lived in Falls Church, VA, was born in Santiago, Chile. She came to the United States about 1930 and grew up in Pennsylvania. She was a graduate of Swarthmore College. She received a master’s degree in library science from Drexel University and a master’s degree in history from George Washington University. She received a doctoral degree in history from American University.
Dr. Kahler was a past chair of the Scholarly Resources Committee of the Latin American Studies Association and a board member of the Seminar on the Acquisition of Latin American Library Materials. She was a member of the Society for Spanish and Portuguese Historical Studies, the Brazilian-American Cultural Institute, the American Historical Association, and the Society of American Archivists.
She is survived by her husband of 40 years, of Falls Church, VA.
George W. Kahler
Falls Church, VA
Michael Kraus
Michael Kraus, professor emeritus of history at the City College of New York, died August 9 in Sun City, AZ at the age of 89.
Professor Kraus was graduated from City College in 1923 and earned his graduate degrees at Columbia University. He joined the history department at City College in 1926 and retired after 40 years at the college.
A recipient of a Social Science Fellowship and a Guggenheim Fellow, he was an effective teacher and a productive scholar. His doctoral dissertation, Intercolonial Aspects of American Culture on the Eve of the Revolution, paved the way for his pioneer work, The Atlantic Civilization: 18th-Century Origins, which focused attention on the indebtedness of European culture to American influence.
Dr. Kraus contributed to the study of American historiography in A History of American History, reissued some sixteen years later by the University of Oklahoma Press under the title The Writing of American History. He was also the author of Immigration: The American Mosaic, and of The United States to 1865 (in the University of Michigan History of the Modern World, edited by Nevins and Ehrmann). In addition to his books he was a contributor to periodicals through his articles and book reviews.
Dr. Kraus was one of the most distinguished members of the History Department at City College. A member of the American Historical Association for more than 50 years, he initiated the Michael Kraus Research Grant to assist younger scholars. He was known by his students as a warm, concerned, and dedicated scholar.
Eugene Lunn
Eugene Lunn, professor in the University of California, Davis Department of History since 1970, died on March 14 at the age of 48.
Dr. Lunn was born on September 24, 1941, in Brooklyn, NY. In 1962 he was graduated from Brandeis University and in 1968 he received the Ph.D. from Berkeley. After teaching two years at Reed College, he joined the Davis faculty as a modern European intellectual and cultural historian. Dr. Lunn wrote two books of major importance: Prophet of Community: The Romantic Socialism of Gustav Landauer and Marxism and Modernism: An Historical Study of Lukàcs, Brecht, Benjamin and Adorno.
In recent years, Professor Lunn had been working on a study of the debates among critical intellectuals in Germany, England, France, and the United States over the socio-political significance and aesthetic value of 20th-century popular culture.
In remembrance of Dr. Lunn, the Davis History Department will sponsor, in his name, an annual lecture by a distinguished scholar on an important theme in contemporary historiography.
William W. Hagen
University of California, Davis
Scott Harrison Lytle
Scott Harrison Lytle, professor of history emeritus at the University of Washington, died on July 21 in Seattle. He was 71.
Dr. Lytle was born in New York City on October 12, 1918. He attended Princeton University, studying under Joseph Strayer and Robert Palmer; he graduated in 1940 with highest honors in history and won the France-Amerique Prize for his senior thesis on Nature and Grace in Pascal.
He went on to Cornell University, where in 1940 to 1941 he was a member of Carl Becker’s last seminar. From 1942 to 1946 he served in the Counter Intelligence Corps of the Army. Returning to Cornell after the war, he completed his doctoral dissertation, Historical Materialism and the Social Myth, under the direction of Edward Whiting Fox in 1948.
Dr. Lytle began his teaching career as an instructor at Princeton in the autumn of 1948. A year later he joined the Department of History, University of Washington, where he remained until his retirement in 1988. In the summer of 1964 he was a visiting professor at Cornell University, and he spent several quarters teaching in the University of Washington’s program in Avignon, France.
At the University of Washington he taught undergraduate courses in medieval and modern European history and advanced courses on early modern France and on the French Revolution and Napoleon, as well as directing a number of doctoral dissertations in French history. He published articles on Georges Sorel, Benedetto Croce, and the French Revolution, including a pioneering article on “The Second Sex (September 1793)” in The Journal of Modern History in 1955. From 1966 to 1975 he was the associate editor of French Historical Studies.
David H. Pinkney
Thomas J. Pressley
University of Washington
Edwin O. Reischauer
Edwin O. Reischauer, professor emeritus of Harvard University, died September 1 at the age of 79. Dr. Reischauer was a renowned East Asian scholar who taught at Harvard University for more than 40 years and served as U.S. ambassador to Japan from 1961 to 1966.
Dr. Reischauer was born in Tokyo to American educational missionaries. Raised in Japan, he graduated from the American School in Tokyo in 1927. At 17, he enrolled in Oberlin College, where he majored in history. He graduated Phi Beta Kappa in 1931 and then went to Harvard, where he received a master’s degree in history in 1932.
He did postgraduate work at the University of Paris, the Universities of Tokyo and Kyoto, and in China, receiving his doctorate in Far Eastern languages from Harvard in 1939.
An instructor at Harvard from 1938 to 1942, Dr. Reischauer left the university to work as a senior research analyst for the State Department and the War Department before joining the Army as a major in 1943.
While in the Army, he was awarded the Legion of Merit and rose to the rank of lieutenant colonel as an acknowledged expert on Japanese culture and Japanese military codes.
After a brief stint with the American occupational government after World War II, he returned to Harvard as an associate professor of Far Eastern languages. In 1950 he became a professor of Japanese history and later held various positions at the university, including director of the Harvard Yenching Institute and director of Harvard’s Japan Institute (now the Edwin O. Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies).
In 1961 he left Harvard to become the U.S. ambassador to Japan. Able to address the Japanese in their own tongue and with a deep understanding of their society and culture, Dr. Reischauer was regarded as an ideal American spokesman.
In 1966, he returned to Harvard, where he was appointed University Professor. Japan’s First Class Order of the Rising Sun was conferred on him in 1968 for his work to promote better understanding between cultures. His list of honorary degrees includes recognition from Harvard, Yale, Oberlin, Michigan, Chicago, Brandeis, Dennison, and the Japanese universities of Nihon, Rikkyo, and Keio. In 1988 he received the American Historical Association’s Award for Scholarly Distinction.
Dr. Reischauer’s contributions to his field include his most recent books: The Japanese Today: Change and Continuity and My Life Between Japan and America: Memoirs. His readable history, Japan: The Story of a Nation, was an expanded follow-up of a previous work, Japan, Past and Present. He also wrote two detailed studies of the T’ang Dynasty in China: Ennin’s Diary: The Record of a Pilgrimage to China in Search of the Law and Ennin’s Travels in T’ang Japanese Literature. He has authored several books on U.S. policy, including Toward the Twenty-first Century: Education for a Changing World; Beyond Vietnam: The United States and Asia; and Wanted: An Asian Policy.
Dr. Reischauer is survived by his wife Haru; two daughters, Ann Heinemann of San Diego and Joan Simon of Larchmont, NY; a son, Robert of Washington, D.C.; and nine grandchildren.
Priscilla Smith Robertson
Priscilla Smith Robertson, 79, a respected historical scholar and lecturer, died on November 23, 1989.
Born in Paris, France in 1910, Ms. Robertson received her A.B. from Vassar College in 1930. Her research focused on 19th-century history and the history of women and family life. Her publications include, among other works, The Revolutions of 1848 (1952) and An Experience of Women: Pattern and Change in 19th-Century Europe (1982).
Ms. Robertson was a history lecturer at Indiana University from 1962 to 1967 and a visiting lecturer there from 1967 to 1968. During this time she was also a Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute of Independent Studies from 1965 to 1967, and she spent a semester at Harvard University in 1966. In 1968 she was appointed as a visiting lecturer in history at Kentucky Southern College.
Ms. Robertson’s life-long interest in public policy issues was apparent in her commitment to community involvement and public service. In the 1930s, working with the Southern Tenant Farmer’s Association, she traveled south to help organize tenant farmers. She was a chapter president of the Massachusetts ACLU in the 1950s. After moving to Kentucky, she helped found the Kentucky Humanities Council and the Kentucky League of Women Voters. She was also a Sunday editor of the Courier Journal of Louisville, Kentucky.
In 1956 Ms. Robertson received the National Institute of Arts and Letters Award. She was a long-time member of the American Historical Association.
Ms. Robertson was known among her colleagues for her love of ideas, her dedication to teaching, and her intellectual tenacity. At the time of her death she was working on a semi-autobiographical photo-history of southern tenant farmers in the 1930s.
Mary K. Bonsteel Tachau
Mary K. Bonsteel Tachau, a long-time history professor at the University of Louisville, died on October 1 at the age of 64.
Dr. Tachau received her B.A. from Oberlin College in 1948, her M.A. from the University of Louisville in 1958, and her Ph.D. from the University of Kentucky in 1972. She started teaching at the University of Louisville as an instructor in 1958 and remained there throughout her career. At the time of her retirement in July 1990 she held the title of professor emerita.
At various times she served as the university ombudsman, as the chairwoman of the university’s Committee on the Status of Women, and, from 1974 to 1977, as the first chairwoman of the university’s history department. In 1976, as chairwoman of the university senate, she was the first woman to sit on the University of Louisville’s board of trustees.
Her specialties were American constitutional and legal history, and, in a description she accepted, “rocking the boat.” Among her many publications are Federal Courts in the Early Republic: Kentucky 1789–1816; “The Whiskey Rebellion in Kentucky: A Forgotten Episode of Civil Disobedience,” Journal of the Early Republic, Fall 1982; “Another Look at the Whiskey Rebellion,” The Whiskey Rebellion: Past and Present Perspectives; “George Washington and the Reputation of Edmund Randolph,” Journal of American History, June 1986; and “Women in the Southern Constitutional Tradition,” The South and the American Constitutional Tradition, 1988.
Dr. Tachau was the recipient of numerous fellowships, including the American Bar Foundation Fellowship in Legal History (1977–78), a NEH fellowship for Independent Study and Research (1981–82), a Philadelphia Center for Early American Studies travel grant (1983), and a NEH Travel to Collections grant (1984).
Dr. Tachau received the University of Louisville College of Arts and Sciences Outstanding Alumna Award in 1964. In 1979 she was awarded the Kentucky Historical Society’s Governor’s Award, and in 1983 she received the Society for the History of the Early American Republic’s Best Article Award. She received two additional University of Louisville awards: the Outstanding Service Award in 1985 and the Outstanding Teacher Award in 1988.
She was active in the ACLU as a board member (1960–76) and chair (1973–75) of the Kentucky Chapter. She was also a member of the state Commission on Human Rights and the Federal Judicial Selection Committee of Kentucky. The academic organizations to which Dr. Tachau belonged include the American Historical Association, the American Association of University Professors, the American Society for Legal History, the Kentucky Historical Society, the Organization of American Historians, and the Society for History of the Early American Republic. At the time of her death she was a council member of the American Historical Association, Vice President of the Teaching Division, and a member of the Finance Committee. She had also been on the American Historical Association’s Special Committee on the Bicentennial Era from 1981–88.
She is survived by her husband, Eric Tachau; three children (Katherine Tachau of Iowa City, IA; Susan Tachau of Philadelphia, PA; and David Tachau of Louisville, KY); her mother, Mrs. Carl Neitzel of Cleveland, OH; a brother, William Bonsteel, of Washington, DC; a sister, Carol Ratliff, of Detroit, MI; and four grandchildren.
C. David Tompkins
C. David Tompkins, 52, professor and former chairman (1971-77) of the Department of History at Northeastern Illinois University, died on January 3.
Born in Battle Creek, MI, in 1939, Dr. Tompkins received his bachelor’s degree from Northwestern University. He received a master’s degree from the University of Wisconsin and his doctorate in 1966 from the University of Michigan, where he had studied with Professor Sidney Fine.
Dr. Tompkins taught U.S. history and was a specialist in foreign policy. An indefatigable researcher, he had lectured extensively on his research and was the author of about 20 articles, short stories, and biographical sketches. He wrote the book Arthur Vandenberg: The Evolution of a Modern Republican, about the founding father of the American bipartisan foreign policy in the post-war years. The book became a standard reference for the study of the post-war period.
Dr. Tompkins also taught briefly at the University of Wisconsin, Loyola University-Chicago, Western Michigan University, and the University of Illinois. He was widely recognized as an outstanding classroom teacher who challenged students to think beyond the textbook. For the past two decades Dr. Tompkins was a professor of history at Northeastern Illinois University in Chicago.
He is survived by his mother, Mary Catherine Tompkins of Battle Creek; and two children, Robert David Tompkins of Wilmette and Joan Marie Alderton of Clinton, IA.
Melvin G. Holli
University of Illinois at Chicago
Caroline F. Ware
Caroline F. Ware, 90, a former professor of social work and history at Howard University and a former United Nations technical advisor, died on April 5.
Dr. Ware, a native of Brookline, MA, graduated from Vassar College and received master’s and doctoral degrees in history from Harvard University.
After nine years as a history professor at Vassar, she came to the Washington area in 1934. She taught social work at American University from 1935 to 1944.
During that time she also worked in the consumer divisions at the National Emergency Council and the Office of Price Administration.
She was on the faculty of the Howard University School of Social Work from 1945 to 1961. Between 1962 and 1976, she was a technical advisor in community development and cultural affairs for the United Nations with missions in Central and South America.
Dr. Ware wrote several sociological books, including Early New England Cotton Manufacture and A Cultural Approach to History. She was author and editor for UNESCO’s six-volume History of the Scientific and Cultural Development of Mankind.
She was a member of the Washington Urban League, the American Historical Association, and the National Association of Social Workers. She received the Urban League’s community service award in 1974 and the National Consumer League’s Trumpeter award in 1978.
In 1988 Dr. Ware donated her 70-acre farm and apple orchard, worth over two million dollars, to the Northern Virginia Park Authority, which now operates the Meadowlark Gardens Regional Park on the site.
Dr. Ware leaves no immediate survivors. Her husband, Gardiner C. Means, died in 1988.